Member postings for Nick Wheeler

No idea, but it's low enough for anything you can put in the 7mm collet to work well, like this 6mm ball end mill:

That's with it mounted to a vertical slide, which I did originally but it takes far too much setting up to be really useful. The QC holder means it drops straight into place. I didn't want to spend hours building something, but to have a tool that can save a considerable amount of time making another setup for a simple job like cross holes.

That's what I use; an ER11 spindle motor, collets, clamp and power supply from Ebay. I bolted a piece of 10mm square bar to the clamp and fitted it into a quick change holder. took about ten minutes. It cross-drills, mills slots etc and will drill along the lathe axis too.

It is quite long, so won't work on large diameters.

Cost about £90 five years ago, but they're a bit more now.

I expect the drill is still going?

Would a thin, cheap plastic chopping board be a suitable material?

I've been meaning to try it for some time.

So you're expecting stationary cyclists to stop breathing just like stationary drivers do? And just how much more CO2 does a +/- 250Watt cyclist exhale compared to a 125KW IC engine?

Now that we've come up with a formula for how much tax a cycle should pay based on vehicle weights, surely there should be some rebates for a bikes advantages? Things like the amount of space they save, the lack of intrusive noise, better use of fewer resources and of course, recyclability.

I think your weights are about 50% too small. Although that doesn't affect the tax numbers.....

Do millions of people need to do any of those things in their cars often enough that adding the facility to the car is necessary? Surely they would already have devices that can do such things anywhere they might be?

So it connects to the internet via a poncy interface?

That might improve the condition, but bad design could only be fixed by building separate new ones alongside the existing roads and paths. If there was the space and money to do that, it would be better spent by upgrading the roads so every road user would benefit.

I disagree with the 'new' rule that gives pedestrians crossing side roads priority over traffic turning into them; that creates much bigger disturbances in the traffic on main roads which is never a good thing. Pedestrians should be as responsible for their own actions as any other road user.

I'm one of those cyclists! There are many cycle paths around the Medway Towns that I won't use because they are more dangerous than the roads. That's mostly due to terrible design, but some of them are really badly maintained too. Vehicles, and bicycles are vehicles, should be on the road.

The real problem is that many road users are incompetent and/or temperamentally unsuited to the job.

I would have gone with good value.

Another thing to consider when you need such a tool is how much time you spent looking for one and obsessing about its features and involving other people in the process. Anyone who has actually bought stuff for use will know that finding one in the first catalogue you looked at, for a price that's within the budget is ordered and you move onto the next piece of work. Often the hardest part of sourcing stuff is knowing what it's actually called: one of our service engineers was always asking for parts 'like that, but with a bigger flip on the other side. In green'.

And like all small, simple, one operation parts, making them is cheap. But they don't just make one at a time, so you need to add up the material costs. Then there's quality control, stock control, handling, packaging, transport, selling on to at least one retailer etc, etc. They have to make a profit too. The real reason why that Starrett gauge is so expensive: you're buying it from a company that has been making quality stuff for 140years, so you can rely on it without having to spend any of your valuable time improving it.

How much do you expect your gadget to sell for when it's ready for sale?

I'd love to see the inventor's face when he finds all these lovingly crafted high precision features that have cost him so much time and effort immediately deleted in favour of simple to produce parts, that can be assembled by unskilled labour in a sweatshop somewhere none of us have ever heard of.

I've seen and used THIS STUFF for just that sort of repair.

I suspect your caliper joins my 150mm rules. I have several, but always struggle to find one to use. 300mm ones hang on their nail until I need them.....

Finished the Mx5 engine and gearbox mounts for a friend's Cortina based kit car, and bolted the parts in place. Then we refitted the body, admired his wheel and tyre combination, added the radiator and intake trunking to see if there's room(barely) and discussed the way to get the seats, pedals, steering column, dash and Land Rover windscreen installed.

That's a good day, as it now looks like a car rather than a pile of junk. Although there is plenty of that left over from a very rusty Mazda.

Pictures would help......

But the stud holes would be created directly onto the required surface, just like you would physically drill them. And you only need one, created using a hole command that controls the diameter, depth, thread size, and even the drill point you expect. Then it's another editable command to add however many you need around the circle.

And I have no idea why you're creating and moving a box around that isn't even the shape you want.

Once again, you need to stop thinking combined drawing elevations, and start thinking 3D object because that's what you actually want.

Something like this, a sketch that's one rectangle, two equal circles, two extra construction lines, and a symmetry constraint extruded to a solid:

Add an M5 hole 6mm deep

and a pattern of 7(because that's a horrible thing to calculate) around the bore:

So that's one simple sketch, an extrude, one feature(the hole) and a pattern. Any of those four operations can be changed, so you could make the thread imperial, a more reasonable pattern of 6 holes or the block 87.65748380mm long instead of the 75 I chose. Relieving the edges between the bores would be drawn on the face to the required shape, and extruded through the block to cut them out. That could be done on the original sketch, but would make it a bit busy. You would round the four outer edges of the block with one fillet operation that gives full control of the radius applied.

This is far simpler and easier to do than your painful description. Alibre or Solidedge wouldn't be much different.

Edited By Nicholas Wheeler 1 on 01/01/2022 01:10:51

And it's still cracked which is why it has that distinctive buzzy sound; it isn't supposed to sound like that.

Just knowing what it is and why it needs such fiddly to produce parts would be enough, from the limited information we've been allowed.

I wouldn't have even considered moving any of that 'awkward stuff'. It would have all gone straight to the tip.